When it comes to psychological horror games, I’m usually a fan. My first experience with this genre was when I played the 2005 horror from Bethesda called Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The game scared me so much with its ‘on the edge of your seat’ gameplay that more often than not I had to turn off the PC and sit quietly in the corner of the room and try to calm down. It remains to this day my single favorite horror game ever.
Sylvio brands itself as a psychological horror game. It’s set in a distant town, where a massive rainstorm caused most of the town to be covered in a landslide. Since then, a strange mist started to rise from the mud, and the townspeople quickly capitalized on this due to the fact that the mist had properties that killed insects. The owner of the ‘mine’ for the mist was called Bobby, and as you progress throughout the story you gain more and more insight into his story as well.
Jill, a local girl obsessed with ghosts and EVP equipment sets off one night to record all the voices in the mist, of all the people that passed during this massive landslide. You’re equipped with your trusty microphone and soon you find an airgun powered by none other than the spray cans that litter the landscape. Each area you visit you find out more about a specific person who died in that area. As you continue on, you come across darker forces, that follow you and you have to ‘shoot’ them with bolts until they dissipate and you can record their EVPs and gain clues about how you can complete the specific puzzle that you’re faced with.
I have to admit that when I heard of Sylvio, many people said it was a pretty scary looking game and that kind of drew me and simultaneously turned me off. With horror games these days relying on petty jump scares I expected the same from Sylvio. However, this is not the case. Sylvio cannot be classified as a scary game. The game can be creepy at times, but more often than not you’re just burning through it solving puzzles and looking for the ‘bad’ spirits so you can shoot them to get more clues. The first few minutes the game can be quite scary due to the fact that you don’t really know how it works, but as soon as you figure it out, it becomes just another puzzle game with some supernatural elements.
Story-wise the game is quite interesting since you have to record and then listen to EVP tapes searching for sentences and words that can elaborate the story further. At the end of each level, you finally meet the ghost of the person you’re looking for in each area and then hold a seance to find out more about them. It’s unique, and the puzzles aren’t that difficult.
What put me off about this game is the fact that it never pushed you into a situation where your heart raced or made you panic. The game is extremely slow paced and you spend several hours of your time backtracking looking for that vital piece of the puzzle that will move the story forward. The mechanics, however, are quite solid and it never felt like I was battling with the controls to get something done.
In the end though, the story did turn for the worst, not that it was cliched or anything. It’s just the standard type of ending that one might expect, and I sort of felt disappointed by it, not that I saw it coming. Horror games and movies do enjoy their anti-climactic endings these days, and looking back I should have expected it since it kind of tells you what is about to happen during all the seances and recordings you find.
Sylvio as a puzzle game sits right up there with The Witness and Firewatch, however, as a psychological horror game, it fails dismally.
Summary
Sylvio is a ‘psychological horror’ game that is set in a town that experienced one of the biggest landslides in recent history. Jill, who sets out to record the voices of the victims of this massive slide, ends up uncovering the truth behind her life and ultimately her death.
The game features many interesting and complex puzzles that rely on you not only using your intuition but also to hunt for the answers by confronting your fears. It also adds an interesting twist to the game by having you collect pieces of a piece of music that will play after the game ends. As far as it being a horror game, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Psychological horror games tend to thrive on how much it messes you up, and the only thing this game messed up is my ability to keep my lunch down thanks to my tendency for motion sickness.
Sylvio is a good game, but not for the reasons you expect.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.